Episode notes
Eric Yakes runs Epoch Ventures and is the author of The 7th Property: Bitcoin and the Monetary Revolution.
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TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - Immutability as a Core Property of Money
01:19 - The Evolution of Money: From Private to Centralized
03:20 - Coinage, Coin Clipping, and Roman Debasement
05:11 - Banking Origins: Receipts and Fractional Reserves
07:14 - Central Banks, Paper Money, and the Telegraph Era
09:38 - The Fiat Era: Debt Expansion and Moral Hazard
11:19 - How Bitcoin Removes Monetary Tradeoffs
13:14 - Trust, Human Fallibility, and Objective Verification
16:58 - A Distributed Future: Bitcoin Meets AI
20:37 - Agency, Incentives, and Escaping Fiat Life Scripts
23:42 - Why Monetary Technology Adopts Slowly
25:51 - Adoption S-Curves: Store of Value Comes First
31:44 - Volatility, Institutions, and Capital Depth
38:02 - Volatility vs. Risk: Narratives Drive Markets
43:46 - Why Bitcoin Is Hard to Understand
47:58 - Banks, Credit, and Fractional Reserve on Bitcoin
57:32 - Hot Takes: Nasdaq Correlations and Crashes
01:00:16 - Quantum Computing and Bitcoin as a Protocol
01:04:22 - Fears and Hopes: Freedom Money and Mining
ℹ️ EPISODE SUMMARY
Bram Kanstein and Eric Yakes discuss why Bitcoin adds immutability as a new property of money. They trace how trust slid from coinage to banks to fiat, and why moral hazard keeps showing up. Yakes frames Bitcoin self-custody as lowering the cost of sovereignty, like holding value on a USB instead of in a vault. They confront volatility, institutions, and why narrative moves markets before fundamentals. They close on credit, fractional reserve incentives, quantum computing, and Bitcoin’s long game.
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